Today's big bad Facebook revelation is a search engine?not for the web, but for your entire life. And it's just another step in Facebook's attempt to conquer the entire Internet. Meet Graph Search.
Facebook's search has been convoluted and weak for years until now?it's hard to expect what you get when you type anything in, even if it's your best friend's name. People, pages, maybe places. Boring and often broken. But with today's search monster, Zuckerberg isn't just offering you a way to find your friends (or college frenemies). And it's beyond just some attempt at a Google replacement. It's an attempt to do what Google failed at doing?pulling all the information that matters to you within the context of your social life, skipping the results that are popular to The Internet, in favor of the results that are popular within a group you actually give a damn about. Not a horde of strangers. Everyone you know uses Facebook, and now those people are going to work for you when you search.
Graph Search doesn't replace the current Facebook search, but offers a massively expanded new way to explore your web social life. Photos, places, interests, and of course, people can all be cataloged and called up instantly.
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For example: searching for a sushi restaurant won't just bring up a well-linked list a la Google. Instead, your restaurant query will be answered with a little help from your friends, presenting you with suggestions based on where your relations have checked in. Or if you're looking for music, the recent selections of your pals will inform the results. For any occasion, the answer doesn't lie with some invisible algorithm pointed out toward the web void, but at the people you know, who are doing or have done the thing you're talking about. Your friends' experiences will give you answers to what you're wondering. At least that's the idea. And if it works, we'll have a reason to skip opening a new tab headed to Google.com?an enormous victory for Facebook, and a profound change in how we all use the Internet every single day.
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[h=3]So how does Graph Search work?[/h] Graph Search (currently in beta, rolling out "slowly") is a live, constantly updating list of results, triggered from a nice thick search box at the top left of the page. It changes as you type, a la Google's autocomplete queries. Anything that can't be found inside Facebook's social storehouse will be outsourced to Bing.
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As you start typing, say, "photos of my friends," results will pop up. If you add "taken in 2008," you'll get those photos.
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Searches are built using simple, natural language searches. "Friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter." "What music do my friends like?" Even more complicated questions, like "People named Brian who went to Princeton and like Star Wars." Or hey, even "Friends of friends who are single and like Game of Thrones." Boom?time to start flirting. Or poking. It's also completely geographically aware, so if you're a college sophomore looking to branch out, you can see if you have any mutual friends at a nearby school who share some hobbies with you. Instant results, with faces to put to names.
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It's also deeply graphical?and looks like the easiest way to navigate Facebook photos we've ever had. "Photos of my friends." "Photos of my friends in Tokyo." "Photos I've liked"?yep, you'll be able to instantly pull up all the photos you've given the thumbs up to for the entirety of your time on the social network. It's revelatory, and wonderfully nostalgic.
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It looks incredibly fast, and allows for the kind of spastic hopping around that's become natural on Facebook. Every piece of data you share on Facebook, now searchable, will be privacy aware?meaning it's only available to the friends you want it to be available to, not the web. You won't be dumped into some Internet database. If you want to filter parts of your life out of Graph Search, you can do that with the newly-expanded privacy controls Facebook http://gizmodo.com/5970373/facebooks-new-privacy-settings-are-here-this-is-what-you-need-to-do-right-now?tag=facebook. Facebook is even going to prompt you to review everything you've shared before Graph Search launches, meaning you'll be able to sweep undesirable photos (or interests?you liked Two and A Half Men?) under the query rug.
Graph Search isn't done. You can't search all of the bazillion posts you and your friends have written, it's not available on mobile, and there are still enormous parts of Facebook that haven't been mapped yet. But that'll come.

It's both good and bad for business. Millions of people use Facebook and the more features it provides to those users the more they will be connected to the social network. In return less people will be searching for things like restaurants on Google and instead they will just find them through Facebook. It would be nice if Facebook would be more open. Personally, although I like the idea of connecting with people by providing more information about yourself, I at the same time hope this doesn't work and falls apart because it's a big privacy issue. With so much detail on you, they will be able to trace you throughout the Internet just by looking at the things you do, the things you are interested in, and the way you write. That's a big threat to privacy.

"We are not indexing the web. We are indexing our map of the graph, which is really big and constantly changing. Almost a million new people every day. 240 billion photos. 1 billion people. 1 trillion connections."

While I would not call this a war, Facebook has definitely drawn up some battle plans. It's a good step in the right direction from one of the few companies that can compete with Google. In fact, it may prompt Google to give social signals greater weight in an algorithm that is now slanted towards producing profits for Google over delivering relevance to end users. Competition is a good thing.

It's both good and bad for business. Millions of people use Facebook and the more features it provides to those users the more they will be connected to the social network. In return less people will be searching for things like restaurants on Google and instead they will just find them through Facebook. It would be nice if Facebook would be more open. Personally, although I like the idea of connecting with people by providing more information about yourself, I at the same time hope this doesn't work and falls apart because it's a big privacy issue. With so much detail on you, they will be able to trace you throughout the Internet just by looking at the things you do, the things you are interested in, and the way you write. That's a big threat to privacy.

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Zuckerberg says the search feature is "privacy aware." That means users can only search for content that has been shared with them.

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